From deep within the woods came a voice. “Dr. Hannah,” it called.
The dogs all turned to look.
“Ahoy,” I shouted back. “Ahoy, ahoy!”
Through the thickets came several dogsleds. Trudy and Eggers were in the lead, with Gerry and his kids on the next sled, followed by Farley and my father, mushing together. Driving up, Trudy dismounted with the momentum. She had a box of dog biscuits in her hand. Eggers set the brake and followed, brandishing the golf club. She slung the whole box of biscuits out, broadcasting them across the snow. Uniformly, the dogs went for them. Trudy walked toward me, shaking her head at my pathetic state. “Remember my pledge to aid you?” she asked. “Remember ‘no matter what engaged’? This one doesn’t count. This was too easy.”
Eggers was laughing. “That is the saddest spear I have ever seen.”
Trudy put a hand on her hip. “Dr. Hannah,” she said, “just about every decision you’ve made on your mission to rescue Yulia has ensured that we’d have to rescue you. Is that what you really wanted, for us to come save you? Well, here we are. We’ve dropped everything. We came for you. Next time, just ask. When this little trip is over, the real problems begin. That’s when I have to find a way to Okinawa.”
I leapt from the tree. My legs had nearly gone to sleep up there. Leaning on the spear, I nodded to Trudy. That’s all I could do, nod that I understood.
Eggers said, “Let’s get out of here before the biscuits wear off.”
* * *
We followed the tracks of my departed sled. Of its cargo, only three items had bounced free along the traiclass="underline" my university regalia, a bottle of bourbon, and a lone box of research, which, when I inspected it, turned out to be my most prized data — the Greenlandia Ice Sheet results. Fate is not always so cruel as she seems. The sled, it would turn out, was something we’d never see again. The dogs, I must presume, were lost. And the precious research remains at large, waiting for your discovery and excavation, my colleagues of the next millennium.
We broke camp a few miles upstream. There were cabins and fishing lodges in the woods, but we passed them by. Who could rest on such sofas? Who could approach coffee tables laden with dog-eared Christmas catalogues and half-sipped cups of herbal tea? We stopped in a clearing near the bottleneck of the lake, and our camp consisted of parking the sleds in a circle, igniting a green fire, and staring at each other as we ate from cold tins of franks and beans, which were Gerry’s contribution to the endeavor.
We were too indifferent to unharness the dogs, and we watched blankly as Gerry’s kids played a game called “school bus,” whose only rule was a three-elbow limit. Farley had brought a complement of five-gallon buckets. These we sat on, hands extended toward the cold fire. It was late afternoon, still an hour till dusk, yet already dark thoughts had set upon us. Each person, you could tell, was taking stock.
Farley asked, of no one in particular, “Is a puffin a penguin?”
Eggers said, “A puffin’s an aquatic bird, but they’re different somehow. I think puffins live in Iceland, while your typical penguin is Antarctic.”
“Well, they’re birds that live in the middle of nowhere, right?” Farley asked. “Surely the penguins are okay, way down in Antarctica. How could the puffins be gone, out there in Iceland?”
Dad said, “How about parrots, deep in the jungle?”
Gerry said, “I’ve been thinking. There are a lot of missile silos in North Dakota. People go down in those things for months at a time. I bet there are scads of people down there. I bet they don’t even know what happened.”
Eggers sucked his plastic spoon clean and pointed it at the sky. “Isn’t there a team of scientists up on that space station?”
“What about remote weather outposts?” my father asked.
“What about submarines?” Farley responded.
“And islands,” Trudy said. “People have to be okay on islands. If all the people exposed to the disease are dead, then there’s no one left to spread it. Let’s say a person went to an island, a person like me — do you think I would infect the people there?”
We fell silent. When the smoke blew in your face, the sap in it made you cry.
“You know what I keep thinking about?” Trudy asked. “I keep thinking up questions to put on my Arc-Intro exam. I’d only written half of it, and I keep thinking ‘Humans are descended from (a) Neanderthals; (b) Cro-Magnon; or (c) Unknown.’ And now there’s no exam. There’s no school. And all the students are—”
I stood. “Stop this,” I told them. “Stop this idle speculation.”
It had been a hard day, and I didn’t want to give anyone grief, but this speculation would lead to nostalgia, and then regret, and everything was downhill from there.
“None of you knows anything about what happened,” I told them. “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Trudy and Eggers — you’re doctoral candidates. Since when do you form hypotheses without first gathering data? Haven’t I taught you to confront the unknown with industry and self-application?”
Eggers said, “We were doctoral candidates. Now my dissertation was for nothing. My university doesn’t even exist. Anthropology doesn’t exist.”
I pointed a finger at the boy. “Police that kind of talk right now,” I told him. “Look at the pathetic fire you built. Observe its lack of heat. Notice how the wind blows right through it. That’s what you learned from your dissertation? You want a Ph.D. for that? And, Trudy, I’ve seen you throw a spear, yet you settle for cold beans from a can. What happened to the woman as artist and hunter? As for the rest of you: Gerry, is this how you treat dogs, leaving them hungry and wet in their traces? My friend Farley, now is the time we need someone to go fishing, and you sit on a bucket, contemplating penguins?”
Here my father looked at me, waiting for his admonition. He had to settle for a drink order. “There’s a bottle of bourbon in my litter,” I told him. “We could all stand to have someone fixing drinks.”
And so we rallied. In the soft light of sunset, I followed Trudy to one of the country cabins. There a deer pawed through crusty snow, looking for forgotten onions in a dormant garden. Crouched behind a tree, Trudy readied her weapon. Then she stood. When the deer looked, she froze. In plain sight, Trudy advanced on the deer, pausing each time it lifted its head. When it lowered its muzzle to the snow a final time, she punched its side with an atlatl dart, traveling a hundred miles an hour. The animal dropped directly, though it took several minutes to die. Prey animals possess the trait of self-pacification in the face of death; a peace comes over them, then they depart wide-eyed, and, I believe, feeling little pain.
Trudy put a knife to its throat. Together we waited for the animal to stop breathing. “It’s time to say thanks,” Trudy said.
The animal had the finest velvet covering the base of its horns. I touched this.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you,” I said. “But thanks a lot.”
It felt a little weird saying thanks to a deer, but it was definitely better than not saying anything at all. When those big eyes reflected no light, Trudy drew the blade.
Together, we field-dressed the animal, wrapping the guts in the hide to carry back to the dogs. We could see Eggers’ fire a quarter-mile away, but the closer we came, the more the flames were settling toward coals. Eggers was at work on a roasting spit, and Gerry had rigged a tripod for the fish broth, which smelled clear and pure, even though we had to listen to Farley’s lament at not having the sage, butter, and sherry necessary for consommé. Gerry’s kids staked out the dogs, and then reveled in hacking up the guts and tossing them into open mouths. Dad had scrounged up any containers he could find to serve the drinks. All we had was bourbon with a spoonful of snow, but he fancied up the delivery. He handed Trudy the bottom half of a plastic soda bottle, saying, “Your cosmopolitan, m’lady.” My bourbon and snow came in the red plastic cap to a shaving-cream can. “Martini, double and dirty,” he said.